Thursday, 29 September 2011

Julia Rometti and Victor Costales, ediciones del exotismo ordinario internacional neotropical table
board 240x200 cm on 3 metal table structures, composed of 4 b/w argentic photographic prints 2,5x17,5 cm, 2 color argentic photographic prints 14,5x21,5 cm, 9 b/w photocopied booklets, 3 mini atlas. 2011
“La mesa de las ediciones del exotismo ordinario internacional neotropical” will be updated following the research development. The new elements will join the board and will be articulated with the existing ones. The already existing elements can be rearranged if necessary. The artists will carry out themselves the increase, or if their presence is not possible, will send new items with precise instructions for the new arrangement.

Julia Rometti and Victor Costales, histoire abrégée de la botanomancie portative
b/w digital print on poster paper 45x64 cm, slideshow in aleatrory loop composed of 116 images, 2011
Projected images randomly overlap the reproduction of a Monstera Deliciosa. The images come from the popular scientific soviet magazine KVANT. All these images are illustrated scientific formulas and theories, and associated with the image of a philodendron, offer a new reading on theories and experiments exploring the potential sensitivity and intelligence of plants.

Ediciones del Exotismo Ordinario Internacional Neotropical is an ongoing project taking shape as a serie of non sequential photocopied booklets of variable formats, based on the research about the house plants group named Exotismo Ordinario Internacional Neotropical.

The research is articulating various tracks focusing on neotropical region: gardening, botany, revolutions, literature, clandestine organizations, and organisational systems. The sources of documents are collected through various secondhand bookstores.

The relationship between exploration and inquiry, or more
simply between walking and reflection, is one we can all appreciate (a common
claim being that our best thinking is done on the move). It has a long pedigree,
going back to the school of philosophy founded by Aristotle in ancient Greece,
which was rooted in the practice of empirical observation and knowledge drawn
from experience. The term ‘Peripatetic’ is derived from the ancient Greek term for
‘of walking’ or ‘given to walking about’, it is used to mean itinerant, wandering, meandering, or walking.
While the school is said to have been named after the peripatoi (colonnades) of
the Lyceum (chosen as a meeting place since – as a non-citizen of Athens –
Aristotle could not own property), it is also claimed that it was because of
Aristotle’s habit of walking while lecturing. Thus, peripatetic is also used to
describe itinerant teachers.

In pre-Columbian South America, the Inca road system, or
Qhapaq Ñan, was the most extensive and highly advanced for its time; 10,000
miles of exceptional, all-weather construction that acted as a system of
communication, a source of stability, a sign of Imperial authority and a method
of delineating internal boundaries. “The roads were not only used to separate
people but ‘for thinking, by helping to conceive of the relationship of one to
another’.” However, as the Incas did
not use the wheel for transportation, and did not have horses, the trails were
used almost exclusively by people walking.

Of course, the history of Latin
America is littered with exemplars of the epic voyages of conquest, exploration
and rites of passage. From the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro who
defeated the Incan empire and began the brutal suppression of indigenous culture,
to the German explorer and scientist Friedrich von Humboldt who travelled in
Central and South America between 1799 and 1804 and who wrote extensively on
its natural history and geography. Similarly, the motorcycle journey taken by
Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in the early 1950s, that began as a coming of age, but
became the road to revolutionary politics. In literature and art, there are
equally important examples; the writing of Jorge Luis Borges whose partly
surreal, partly existential literature takes as its central inspiration and
subject the city of Buenos Aires, or the work of pioneering video artist Juan
Downey, whose Video Trans-America project set out to document the continent –
both North and South - during the early 1970s.

This group of artists from across
Latin America share an engagement with the landscape, whether urban or rural. More
specifically, they are concerned with travelling or moving through the
landscape, and frequently with walking, which is combined in their work with
diverse approaches to drawing. Images that are the result of itinerancy or
nomadism, places, scenes and things observed along the way, abound. They journey
out of the studio, into the neighbourhood, the city, the territory or entire
continent beyond, in a manner that evokes by turns Surrealist, Borgesian or
Situationist metropolitan perambulation, or exploration in wilderness spaces
(whether jungle, mountain, desert or pampas). The artist is often seen as a
solitary figure, a strolling flaneur or otherwise a lone traveller who ventures
further afield (predecessors from Casper David Friedrich and Frederick Church
to Richard Long and Francis Alys come to mind). Thus, while these artists share
a sense of the subjective experience of landscape, it results in a diverse range
of concerns and responses. Through their work they raise questions about
ownership and access to territory and its resources, about borders and systems
of control, and the political and economic struggles that stem from these. The poverty
and contingencies of life within some Latin American communities are also
expressed (behind the work are the facts of a continent impacted on by
polarised politics, instability and corruption, the failure of utopian Modernist
developmentalism, a lack of amenities or access to utilities that are elsewhere
taken for granted and where natural disasters such as earthquakes can also
cause chaos and devastation). Some express a fascination with the flora, fauna,
topography and natural riches, while also testifying to the tensions between
nature and culture. Several seem to manifest a sense of ‘topophilia’ and an
obsession with maps and cartographies – but often seeking to undermine their
rationalist purpose. Others look for the bizarre in the everyday, while also
cataloguing aspects of the lived culture of the continent – aspects of life
that are overlooked by guidebooks and don’t conform to the picturesque or
stereotypical. Their work utilizes models and conventions from geographical,
botanical, topographical, political and philosophical or surrealist
investigation. The individual bodies of work destabilise assumptions about the
continent. They present instead individual testaments to the extraordinary
heterogeneity of its people, culture, languages, cities and landscape.

These artists address the actions taken by man in the world,
his passage through the landscape and impact upon it. Often, they themselves
conduct journeys or undertake residencies as a form of aesthetic nomadism. [As
Nicholas Bourriard has argued, nomadism is one of the defining characteristics
of a post-post-modernist era or ‘alter-modernity’.] Symptomatic of this itinerant
tendency is their frequent recourse to drawing. Drawing has always been the
most portable medium, the fundamental exploratory tool to which the artist
returns time and again. However, for these artists, drawing has become a focus
of expanded practices that engage with the landscape and culture as a subject
and source for exploration, as well as philosophical speculation. Not only do
they explore the world at large, but simultaneously the parameters of drawing
itself, often using unconventional materials or strategies. These artists seek
to blur the traditional boundaries between media categorisations; work on paper
becomes sculptural object and simple line drawing becomes video animation.
Drawing travels off the page and into the environment itself.

Tanya Barson, 2011

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Co-publication with Ridinghouse. Edited by Tanya Barson and Kate
Macfarlane, it will include essays by Moacir dos Anjos, Tanya Barson,
Pablo Léon de la Barra & Isobel Whitelegg and colour plates of
works in the exhibition.

Good afternoon and thanks for this
invitation. It is an honor to be
surrounded by so many people whose work I admire and to share this microphone
with them. Thanks Creative Time for the invitation, for giving us a voice, and
for allowing us to put together this type of work.

Today,
September 23rd, Puerto Rico commemorates “El Grito de Lares,” a
rebellion which took place in 1868 against the Spanish regime in the Island. To
my dad I dedicate this remembrance.

It
is not a coincidence that, in this same day, we are here at this summit and
that I am presenting The Cerro Project, name of the community were this project
was developed (which means the hill or small mountain). The community or slum areas that form El
Cerro are located in the Naranjito municipality, south of San Juan and to the
west of Bayamón. Bayamón is the municipality with the most extensive (though
unplanned) horizontal urban sprawl in the Island. So there is a great contrast between these
two neighboring towns, and that is part of the experience when visiting El
Cerro.

El
Cerro community was created even before the municipality of Naranjito was
founded, before 1810, by coffee plantation workers and, even today, is
inhabited by the descendants of these workers and a few other families that
have moved here over the years. El Cerro was shaped by the need of the working
class, without formal education; and as many other neighborhoods alike there is
a negative social stigma about these “types” of communities that’s been
supported by the media.

This
project pretends to pay a tribute to the spontaneous architecture development
that the community has created. How they have maintained the topography of the
place were they live and the harmonious way it stands at the side of the
mountains and on top of the town center.
Also to the way, this spontaneous architecture affects their way of
living as neighbors and as families. In the
first few weeks working with the community it shocked me how the majority of
the people went from one house to the other, and nearly everyone’s doors were
open most of the time.

For
me, there are four major aspects that this project has achieved:

1. It’s a Social Active work of art

2. The exchange of knowledge between people
that normally wouldn’t share [artists, guest and volunteers from different
social backgrounds meet, share and learn from each other].

3. An open community for other artistic or
social projects, activities and workshops.

4. And finally it is still a formal or
traditional painting brought to the spectacle of reality.

We
started this project by visiting the people in the community, showing them some
proposals in sketches, drawings, and suggesting the possibility of painting
their houses in different shades of greens for free. Some neighbors told us: “Finally someone is
looking up here; someone wants to do something with us!” Others were skeptical about the project and
about us, asking "Are they from the government?, "do they come from
the police? As for the color, some neighbors would make comments about it right
away: “GREEN!! But this is a mountain already!” Others would joke, saying, “Now the cows will
eat the balconies,” or, would say in a derogatory way: “What will we do on
Thursdays? That’s a gay color to have on that day!”

Another
objection to the color was politics: the color green is linked to the
pro-independence party (blue with the pro-statehood party and red to the
commonwealth party.) That is why painting the first house in the neighborhood
was so significant. It was Ivette
Serrano’s house. Her house was blue. She decided to paint her house because she
thought that the project would help unify the community and bring something
positive for the younger generation, and also because she wanted to help the
artists that pretended to make an art work of the whole community. Some people just said “yes” because their
houses would be painted for free; others preferred to paint with us, while
others would take the paint and do it themselves, as they said: We’ll paint”,
so they painted their houses themselves. I won’t forget to see Cabe and Jossy cleaning
and preparing the exterior of their house in order to paint it. After
finishing, they sat in front of their newly painted house, having some beers
and admiring their work, even the colors, and saying, “This is a work of art.”

Another
great experience for me was when the neighbors themselves went to the lookout
point,the mountain in front of the community,
to watch the progress of the ‘piece’ and started to decide which color would be
used and what houses should be painted next.
From that point on, the project was, in a way, in the hands of the
community or, at least, they were in charge of its direction and logistics.

Since
the first weeks, working in El Cerro we started doing some informal workshops
on Saturdays –that afterwards became a routine and formal events, being the
first making El Cerro T-shirt, were participants from the community would cut
materials to make their own original shirts based on their views of the
community. The workshops, which were given by social workers, artists and
volunteers and other professional such as my mom, Luisa Seijo, were given to
children, teenagers, and people of all ages. Some of the themes were:

“What I like or dislike about El Cerro,”

“Knowing your rights (review of the law),”

“Letting the anger out,” among others.

For this project, I had the support and
collaboration of many, many people and organizations, including the Institute
for Community Development from the University of PR, a complete interdisciplinary class where
students and professors worked closely with residents of the community. And
mostly volunteers who became the 'engine' of the processes, by painting, giving
workshops and as leaders of the project, some of them got really involved in
the community, like Jeanelis, she ended up been teacher in the town and a Resident of El Cerro. Another great volunteer
Bubu Negron is now a well known artist.

Through
the process of painting, the neighbors met and visited one another. In some cases, neighbors that hadn’t visited
each other in 14 years met again while painting each other’s house. Even
neighbors that didn’t talk each other would find a way to communicate again.
Others TOLD me how they were ashamed of living in the community most of their
lives and that now they were proud of being from El Cerro and were able to see
how beautiful their community is. Some would appreciate how we worked letting the kids and teenagers work
closely with us. Even people who didn’t
paint their houses would participate as volunteers and leaders of the project.

The
other important point of the project is how the locals from the barrio are
willing to work in other artists’ projects.
In 2002 Raymond Chavez and Pablo Leon de la Barra came to the community
and became residents for a few weeks. Raymond developed “hanguiando, el
periodico con patas” (hanging-out: the newspaper with legs, or friends, as they
say in Peru). For this project, he had
an office with a scanner, a printer, a voice recorder, computer, and thread
with clips to hang the pages of this open and public newspaper.

Pablo
Leon de la Barra created El Museo del Cerro (el Cerro Museum). By visiting most of the houses of the
community and choosing objects that should be in the communal Museum, he ended
up co-curating the collection of this ‘new’ museum. The actual museum was done in the abandoned
community center, which we cleaned and painted as part of our intervention in
El Cerro. Now, the Center has a roof and air conditioning due to governmental
aid but, mainly, as a result of the community effort in getting what they
deserved and need.

New
leaders have emerged from this barrio. One of them is Cuco. With his help the community was able to
prevent the government to build three new roads that would have changed the
entire barrio as its people conceived it.
Cuco continued to coordinate new workshops and activities for the
community. (By the way, he is now living
in NYC and will be with us later for the the exhibitions.)

It
has been almost 10 years since the project began. Throughout these years, El
Cerro has had an impact on different projects, and certainly it has had an
impact on the residents of this community and the town. But it also has an impact on the common passerby,
who is intrigued by what he or she sees and comes up to the mountain asking,
“Hey, what’s happening here?” It is true
that El Cerro Project is perceived from the outside, but is inside that you can
experience it.

Chemi Rosado Seijo:
Born 1973.Lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Chemi Rosado Seijo is an artist whose practice weaves social commentary and artistic practice. His work juxtaposes architecture and the urban landscape, work and social action, and art and its history. In Historia sobre Ruedas (History on Wheels), his 2005 project with Art in General, Seijo mapped Manhattan from the perspective of a skateboarder, re-drawing the city in terms of its skating sites. For another project, Tapando para Ver (Closing to See) (2001), which culminated in a book, Seijo covered up parts of text from newspaper clippings with charcoal leaving only specific words, suggesting that all language might be a form of manipulation and drawing attention to the degree to which commercial information is controlled by the media. Since 2001, Chemi Rosado-Seijo has worked with the inhabitants of El Cerro, in Puerto Rico, painting all of the houses in the village in different shades of green. Over several years, and through negotiation and collaboration with the inhabitants of the community, over 100 buildings have been painted. Seijo has participated in numerous exhibitions and biennials including the Whitney (2002), Prague (2005), Havana (2006), and Pontevedra (2010).

Creative Time Summit:
The Creative Time Summit is a conference that brings together cultural producers—including artists, critics, writers, and curators—to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. Their international projects bring to the table a vast array of practices and methodologies that engage with the canvas of everyday life. The participants range from art world luminaries to those purposefully obscure, providing a glimpse into an evolving community concerned with the political implications of socially engaged art. The Creative Time Summit is meant to be an opportunity to not only uncover the tensions that such a global form of working presents, but also to provide opportunities for new coalitions and sympathetic affinities.http://creativetime.org

EXHIBITIONS, PROJECTS AND TEXTS BY PLB

ABOUT ME

"At the end of the fifteenth of his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind' Schiller states a paradox and makes a promise. He declares that ‘Man is only completely human when he plays’, and assures us that this paradox is capable ‘of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living’. We could reformulate this thought as follows: there exists a specific sensory experience—the aesthetic—that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community. There are different ways of coming to terms with this statement and this promise. You can say that they virtually define the ‘aesthetic illusion’ as a device which merely serves to mask the reality that aesthetic judgement is structured by class domination. In my view that is not the most productive approach..." from
Jacques Rancier, 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes', New Left Review 14, April-March 2002

SHORT BIO

Pablo León de la Barra is an exhibition maker, independent curator and researcher. He was born in Mexico City in 1972. León de la Barra has a PhD in History and Theories from the Architectural Association, London. He has curated among other exhibitions ‘To Be Political it Has to Look Nice’ (2003) at apexart and Art in General in New York; ‘PR04 Biennale’ (2004, co-curator) in Puerto Rico; ‘George and Dragon at ICA’ (2005) at the ICA-London; ‘Glory Hole’ (2006) at the Architecture Foundation-London; ‘Sueño de Casa Propia’(2007-2008, in collaboration with Maria Ines Rodriguez) at Centre de Art Contemporaine-Geneve, Casa Encendida-Madrid, Casa del Lago-Mexico City, and Cordoba, Spain; ‘This Is Not America’ at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2009); ‘Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at the CCE in Guatemala (2010); ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, Cerith Wyn Evans at Casa Barragan, Mexico City (2010); ‘Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2011); 'Bananas is my Business: the Southamerican Way' at Museu Carmen Miranda, Rio de Janeiro (co-curated with Julieta Gonzalez, 2011); 'MicroclimaS' at Kunsthalle Zurich (2012); 'Esquemas para una Oda Tropical', Rio de Janeiro, 2012; 'Marta 'Che' Traba' at Museo La Ene, Buenos Aires (2012); Novo Museo Tropical at Teoretica, San Jose, Costa Rica (2012); Museu Labirinto / Museum of Unlimited Growth, ArtRio, Rio de Janeiro (2012); The Camino Real Arcades, Lima, Peru (2012). PLB has acted as advisor and/or art curator for the following art fairs: Pinta/London (2010-12), Maco/Mexico (2009-1012), Circa/Puerto Rico (2010), La Otra/Bogota (2009), ArteBA/ Buenos Aires (2012), ArtRio/Rio de Janeiro (2011-2013). León de la Barra has written amongst other publications for: Frog/Paris, PinUp/New York, Purple/Paris, Spike/Austria, Tar/Italy, Wallpaper/London, Celeste/Mexico, Tomo/Mexico, Rufino/Mexico, Ramona/Buenos Aires, Metropolis M/Amsterdam, Numero Cero/Puerto Rico. PLB has also written texts for many artists and exhibition catalogues, lectured internationally and participated in many international symposiums where relevant topics to arts, culture and society have been discussed. PLB was co-director of ‘24-7’ an artists-curatorial collective in London from 2002-2005 and artistic director of ‘Blow de la Barra’ in London from 2005-2008. From 2005 to 2012 he was curator of the White Cubicle Gallery in London, a community art space which he also founded. He is also founder of the Novo Museo Tropical, a museum yet to physically exist somewhere in the tropics and curated the First Bienal Tropical in San Juan Puerto Rico (2011). He is also the publisher of Pablo Internacional Editions and editor of his own blog the Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution. He lives and works between London, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, San Juan, Bogota, Lima, Athens, Beirut...